Bike-sharing program coming to Washington D.C.

WASHINGTON -- When Earl Blumenauer was in Copenhagen in 1995, he tried out the city's unique bike-sharing program, which allowed anyone to check out a bicycle and cruise around the city.

"It was just really slick," said Blumenauer, who the next year was elected to Congress and founded the Congressional Bike Caucus.

Since then, the concept of "bike sharing" has remained largely in Europe, with a new 20,000-bicycle system in Paris becoming wildly popular. Largely as a result of Paris' success, several U.S. cities are also looking at establishing their own bike sharing programs.

Such programs take advantage of new technology -- using smart cards or cell phone codes for riders to check out bicycles from bike shelters. They're funded through a variety of means, including advertising, modest user fees, or government subsidies.

Unlike its European counterparts, the United States does not yet have any government-run bike sharing programs. That will change in Washington this spring, when the municipal government partners with Clear Channel Communications to provide a 120-bike fleet throughout the city.

And Blumenauer, D-Ore., has gotten involved by launching a modest pilot program that will provide up to 30 bicycles around the Capitol Hill complex for employees of the House of Representatives to check out.

"This could have strong application where there's a lot of people in concentrated areas where you don't want the pollution and the congestion," Blumenauer said.

Local governments in the United States are showing greatly increased interest, said Paul DeMaio, owner of MetroBike LLC, which consults on bike sharing programs.

"It's going to happen," DeMaio said. "It's going to be the leaders of the pack that show the rest of the country what the concept is."

According to data that DeMaio posted to his blog about bike-sharing (bike-sharing.blogspot.com), in the second half of last year there were about 75,000 trips per day on the Parisian bike-sharing system, and 166,000 people bought annual subscriptions for $45. In six months, people purchased 205,000 weekly tickets and 2.5 million daily tickets.

When Blumenauer's program launches by May, it will be one of the few employer-provided modern bike sharing programs in the United States. Blumenauer recently spoke with the head of Humana, a large insurance company in Louisville that has provided a bike sharing program to its thousands of employees.

Blumenauer hammered out the details of the system with Dan Beard, the chief administrative officer of the U.S. House. The House will select a vendor to provide bikes on self-service racks throughout the House campus. Employees will register for the program to be able to check out the bikes for short trips.

"You have such a huge concentration of people, and so much of the errand running doesn't need to fire up an engine," Blumenauer said.

Blumenauer sees huge potential for bike sharing in Washington.

"This is a city where there are millions of visitors every year who would take advantage of a bicycle to be able to tour the city," Blumenauer said. "There are lots of people in neighborhoods that are reasonably easy to access."

Blumenauer sees the concept catching on nationwide. As Congress begins discussing the next surface transportation funding bill, with hundreds of billions of dollars for roads and other transportation, he'd like to discuss using a small portion to fund other pilot programs for bike sharing.

In the long run, he said, these could be self-supporting with modest user fees and advertising.

As a Portland, Ore., city commissioner in the early '90s, Blumenauer was responsible for many of Portland's pro-bike policies. According to a 2007 report by the Thunderhead Alliance, Portland ranks first in the nation among major cities for bicycle commuting, with 3.5 percent of trips to work by bicycle. Washington ranks a respectable seventh, but the percentage is less than half that: 1.7 percent.

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